Elizabeth 'Libby' Winstead, 73

Elizabeth McKenrick Winstead, an award-winning knitter and Bryn Mawr School graduate who established a scholarship fund there, died Tuesday of cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. She was 73.

Mrs. Winstead, who went by the nickname Libby, was born in Baltimore in 1939. She was the eldest of three girls.

Her father, a lawyer, served in the armed forces during World War II. During his absence, the girls and their mother moved to Pennsylvania to live with relatives.

In early 1946, Mrs. Winstead's family returned to Baltimore, settling on North Charles Street near the city-county border. Not far from their home was Bryn Mawr, where the young Libby Winstead joined the second-grade class.

Enrolling all three girls at Bryn Mawr was expensive for the family. To keep them at the private school, the administration hired their mother to work part-time in the library and offered the girls scholarship money.

As an adult, Mrs. Winstead was devoted to Bryn Mawr. She served on boards and committees for the school and served as the secretary for her class, tracking down long-lost classmates who had not stayed in touch and trying to get them to contribute news of their lives for class updates.

Mrs. Winstead also established the Elizabeth McKenrick Redwood Scholarship Fund, in her mother's name, at Bryn Mawr. The scholarship provides money for incidental items, such as sporting equipment, to girls in need.

"Coming up [with] money for these extras created enormous stress in her home as a girl, and she did not want any girl to have to experience that," said one of Mrs. Winstead's two sons, Ted Winstead of Bethesda.

As a girl, Mrs. Winstead also studied the piano at the Peabody Institute. She took up the piano again in her later years and continued to play after her cancer diagnosis in November.

Upon graduation from Bryn Mawr, Mrs. Winstead attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After two years, she returned to Baltimore and completed her degree at Goucher College.

Not long after her college gradation, she moved to Washington and worked as an assistant to Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, a Massachusetts Republican. A highlight of working for the senator was winning an office raffle — the prize was a ticket to seePresident John F. Kennedydeliver a State of the Union address.

Mrs. Winstead moved back to Baltimore and worked as a secretary and as a teller at a bank, where she met William H. Winstead III. They were married and moved in the mid-1960s to a home on Lake Falls Road, a short street near the intersection of Falls Road and West Lake Avenue, just over the city line in Baltimore County.

The Winsteads were well connected to Baltimore's urban planning community. Mr. Winstead, who now lives in North Roland Park, worked as a real estate developer and Mrs. Winstead was a secretary for the Greater Baltimore Committee. Mrs. Winstead enjoyed keeping up with commercial development in Baltimore, her son said.

About 20 years ago, after years of vacationing in New Hampshire, Mrs. Winstead decided she wanted to travel to new places.

Before her first trip to Italy, she enrolled in night classes in Italian at the Johns Hopkins University. The classes, and the country, made her fall in love with the language and she organized an Italian conversation club with the assistance of her professor. Mrs. Winstead managed to keep the club going for two decades.

Mrs. Winstead and her husband also traveled to Russia, the Galapagos Islands and Alaska in the 1990s and 2000s.

Before they began traveling, the Winsteads in 1986 bought property inSt. Michaelson the Eastern Shore.

They built a second home there, which they named "Porches."

"They didn't have money to build a big house, so they built a lot of porches on it," Ted Winstead said.

From her mother, Mrs. Winstead learned knitting, a life-long hobby that garnered her blue ribbons in the state fair. Her car bore the vanity license plate "LUV2NIT."

Mrs. Winstead laughed when people misinterpreted her car's tag as "Love Tonight," said her son.

"She was just always knitting," said Ted Winstead said. "All of our pictures have us in sweaters she made."

Mrs. Winstead was a consummate caretaker, her son said. She cared for him when he was severely ill in his 20s, finding an experimental treatment for him in New England. In her final years, she looked after her husband, who hasAlzheimer's disease.

Letter writing and literature were important to Mrs. Winstead.

In her last days, when she received a delivery of daisies — a symbol of the Bryn Mawr School — Mrs. Winstead wrote the giver a thank-you note — "even when her handwriting had deteriorated, along with everything else," Mr. Winstead said.

Last year, onMother's Day, Mrs. Winstead's grandchildren recited poetry from one of Mrs. Winstead's favorite books,A.A. Milne's "When We Were Very Young." The experience gave Mrs. Winstead great joy, her son said.

In her later years, Mrs. Winstead balanced checkbooks and performed bookkeeping for senior citizens unable to do so on their own. She also enjoyed playing tennis and golf and taking her grandchildren to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

"Libby did not suffer fools gladly," said friend and golf partner Joyce Brown. "She was a matter-of-fact person who suffered me only because I was always on time to our golf games. She liked reliability; she herself was totally reliable."

A memorial service will be held May 11 at 11 a.m. at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St., Baltimore.

In addition to her husband and son, Mrs. Winstead is survived by another son, Bill Winstead ofWashington, D.C.; her sisters, Ann Turnbull Wase of Baltimore and Alice Horst of the Villages, Fla.; and two grandchildren.